


Drouk

by Alma_Anor, merripestin



Series: pest's podfic [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha!Sherlock, Beating, Dirty Talk, Dubious Consent, Fingerfucking, First Time, Knotting, M/M, Masturbation, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Omega!John, Omegaverse, Oral Sex, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 2-2.5 Hours, Restraints, Torture, imaginary gender issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:32:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alma_Anor/pseuds/Alma_Anor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/merripestin/pseuds/merripestin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Sherlock and John are being held prisoner by Moriarty, John goes into heat.  Jim chains them up just out of reach of each other and plays with John himself.  </p><p>I never cared much for Omegaverse.  Then I met this prompt on the kink meme and we had filthy sex in a public bathroom.  This fic is my walk of shame.</p><p>Link to podfic included.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Shine on Moriarty's Fingers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [julieta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/julieta/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [Drouk](https://archiveofourown.org/works/491499) by [TheDugongG](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDugongG/pseuds/TheDugongG)



> Podfic ([audio archive MP3 2hrs, 55MB)](http://www.audiofic.jinjurly.com/drouk) by [merripestin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/merripestin)  
> Cover art by CUCLIN.

"You'll like this one. Why do omegas have legs? Because if you thought snail trails in your garden were bad . . . " Jim Moriarty's face altered from cool mask to naughty child and he raised his hand and wriggled his fingers in a little wave so Sherlock could see the wet shine between the fingers of his blue nitrile glove.

Sherlock knew he was supposed to despise Moriarty most for being a mass murderer, compulsive criminal, and deranged sadist, but at the moment what he found most annoying about the man was that after so much promise of brilliance, of interest, of something new, he'd turned out to be just another alpha-supremacist with delusions that his cockhead constituted the godhead. It was just such a _letdown_.

"If I didn't know you've never touched him," Jim drawled, "I'd have lost all respect for you, Sherlock." He sat with careless elegance on the cot across the room, not even looking as his fingers idly stroked between John's buttocks, collecting the first wet secretions of his heat. John had his eyes clamped shut, his teeth gritted, and his face was red with shame and anger.

Sherlock was fairly sure the rage he felt was real, rational as rage could be, but the rising scent of John was turning it into something mad and uncontrolled and  _not helpful_.

Sitting on the cot put Moriarty two meters out of the range allowed by the T-chain attached to the cuffs on Sherlock's wrists, even when he strained his shoulders and used the full length of his legs to kick. He had tried the first day.

It was their third day in the cell, and Sherlock had carelessly missed his medication the two days previous as well. He often did. No risk to it, after all, beyond few extra pheromones floating around, a little extra moodiness from fluctuating hormone levels. Stupid. Careless and stupid and now his brain was marinating in unwelcome chemicals as a punishment.

"Why not keep your own hands clean then? If omegas disgust you so much . . . " Sherlock kept his voice even and conversational, trying to match Moriarty's mood, keep him engaged. It was a moving target; the man shuffled dispositions like playing cards, and Sherlock was not quite in top form.

Jim grinned at him as if they were sharing a friendly little joke. "That _is_ what the gloves are for. But really, they aren't even disgusting. Just dull, dull, _dull_." With the last word he made a little jab at John with a gloved fingertip that made John's face twitch, though John managed to hold any sound inside. "Soaked in hormones and bleating round the farmyard." He made another jab and John winced. "Not like us." He gazed at Sherlock and fluttered his lashes playfully.

"Isn't all this a bit of a distraction from your current . . . campaign?" Sherlock prodded. His voice was still under control but he had long since given himself away, eyes fixed on Jim's hand, on John's arse. John's skin was paler than he'd expected, hair on his legs so light and fine it was nearly invisible. There was a red blemish low on the curve of John's left buttock and an old, slightly raised scar towards the top. Jim, a left-handed man, was using his right hand on John. Every moment was presenting Sherlock with a wealth of detail, of information, and he couldn't make use of any of it.

He didn't even know what scheme Moriarty was in the middle of, had only glimpsed the edges: embezzlement, conspiracy, before he and John had been snatched and brought here to keep them out of Jim's way. "You've proved your point; a few days off medication and you can induce heat in an omega with a single injection. Hardly a new result." He was trying to nudge Moriarty into the idea that this particular game of Humiliate John had run its course, got boring.

"Don't worry about business, I'm making time for you," Jim said. "And I'm very good at multitasking."

"I think I'd prefer that you focus," Sherlock said pointedly. He wanted that lunatic enthusiasm trained back on Sherlock Holmes where it belonged.

"Don't go doubting me," Jim declared, and there went the lashes again. "This is all --" another jab at John -- "about you. I know how bored you get. This is a little distraction." His face went from childish mischief suddenly to dead-eyed anger. "And it's time you see this shitty little omega for what he is."

Jim stood up -- result: he was away from John -- and walked over to Sherlock. Each prisoner had a cot, fixed to the floor at his end of the cell, and Sherlock stayed seated on his, knowing that having him in an inferior position was something Jim would be attracted to. Jim cupped Sherlock's cheek in his damp gloved hand and Sherlock couldn't stop the jerk his body gave at the scent, John wet on his skin. "Time to leave the strained peas and pablum behind, Sherlock, and come take a bite of steak."

Sherlock took it as an invitation, a fast and nasty chop of his teeth together that would have taken a chunk out of Jim's finger or at least torn the glove if he'd pulled back a hair slower. "That's the way," Moriarty crooned at him, dark eyes wide and happy. "Stay hungry. Only another alpha is ever going to really satisfy you, Sherlock."

Sherlock sneered. Alphas. Not too many alphas around these days, and not because they were so exceptional and significant, but because the whole bloody lot of them, Jim and Sherlock and John and all, alphas and omegas alike, were crowding into the narrow end of their evolutionary cul-de-sac.

The normal human population, the 'betas' without the A-O twist in their DNA, had won out. Normal males and females, breeding in whatever season they pleased, breeding with casual success while alphas and omegas coupled frantically four times a year and managed un-aided impregnation slightly more often than, say, pandas in captivity.

What nature and time weren't doing to weed the alphas and omegas out, they were hurrying along themselves with hormone suppressant medication and lifestyle. Until now, John had lived his entire life as a beta man, and his sister's choice to identify as a woman instead was unusual but hardly unique.

Backing smoothly away from Sherlock, Jim gestured to his ever-present bodyguard.

(Not an easy read, this one: his single mother had raised dogs in their home, five years lived in eastern Europe as a teen, done at least three years with one of the larger and less effective mercenary outfits, that was it.)

The guard scooped up the heap of clothes John had shed, at gunpoint, so Jim could carry out his little examination. The gun stayed in the guard's right hand all the time, and there was a second man who always stood just outside the room with his own gun.

(The second man was as bad, all Sherlock could tell was that he had at least one older brother, and had been trained by someone who had been in the United States Army between 1979 and 1991.)

They had yet to make the kind of mistake that would give Sherlock an opening.

"Oi," John protested. He was sitting on his cot now with his legs drawn up in front of him like a barrier, his own chained hands on his knees. "You're leaving me here, stark bollock naked?"

Jim addressed his response to Sherlock. "People who dress up their pets -- so twee, isn't it?" Smirking and smelling faintly of alpha pheromones and more strongly the stolen scent of John, Jim meandered out of the cell in that way he had of always seeming at the mercy of external whims. The guard followed and the door clanged shut behind him, locks engaging automatically.

"Jesus," John whispered, when they were alone again, "Right. I suppose there are ways that could have been worse." He looked at Sherlock, humor brittle in his eyes. "He could have had a drosometer and a speculum."

Neither of them had to say aloud how truly relieved they were.

Sherlock should have known better than to expect Moriarty to go straight for something so pedestrian there was slang for it: 'cattle rustling' -- raping another alpha's omega in front of him. There were shelves dedicated to the topic in most porn shops. Betas liked it. The alphas in the films were always played by betas. Most alphas found the idea less titillating and more stomach-churning.

This was not exactly the same thing, of course. Jim had been quite right, Sherlock had never touched John sexually. John had chosen to live as a beta male. He had sex with women and only with women. Medication kept him out of heat, and his pheromone signature on a normal day was all but nil. Sherlock, who had rejected the whole business of wasting weeks of his life obsessed with some omega and his oestrus, had his own medication. Their partnership worked entirely without interference from their biology.

But now the whole thing was about to fall to pieces.

"Are you all right?" Sherlock asked. It sounded a stupid question. What he meant to ask, but could not, was whether Jim had actually penetrated with his playful little jabbing fingers. Sherlock hadn't been able to see exactly, and the idea that Jim's fingertip might have been inside John was making him feel very strange.  Part of it was anger at the violation of his friend, because John was his friend, and so important, so valuable. That was reasonable, that was probably even _normal_. But another part of it was . . . well it was the hormones saying what alpha hormones always said when not doped into submission, which was: _mine_.

"No," said John. "I haven't had to do. . . _this_ since I was fifteen years old, Sherlock. I'm a man. I'm a fucking bloke. My arse is not supposed to -- god!"

He got up and resumed the pacing he'd started almost as soon as they'd woken that morning.  Omegas in proestrus tended to be restless, and apparently any urge to hide his nakedness had been overridden by the need to move.

John walked in an endless lopsided circle around his cot, out as far as the chain would let him. With every step he clinked. " I don't know if I can take this. You haven't had a wash for three days and my bloody body thinks you smell great. Moriarty even smelled good." He stopped, lips pursing, blinking several times. "I'll deal with it."

"If it helps, you're positively rank and I've got the urge to -- " Sherlock chose to amend the sentence before he spoke, to remove all mention of wanting to stick his nose in under John's arm and just -- "just, breathe you in."

"Yeah, that doesn't actually help, ta."

\---


	2. Shower

Only a few hours later, the last remnants of their hormone suppression drugs had worn off, and John's heat had properly begun.

In silent agreement to avoid all pertinent topics of conversation, they'd been sitting on their cots and talking a load of rubbish and ignoring the situation, and all the time they talked, all the things Sherlock liked about John were suddenly weirdly emphasized, as if he were caricaturing himself. His warm humor, his curious mix of steel and kindness, his refusal to be cowed, his apparently inborn knack for handling Sherlock's oddities, they were all accentuated, as if given thick black outlines in a Japanese print. Yet they were all receding fast as the foreground was dominated by how beautifully made John was, the elegantly simple lines of his body, the artistry of his calves and the blue of his eyes that was like a secret, mistaken for brown by ordinary people but blue for those who had sat close to him in the right light and really looked.

And then the two bodyguards came in and took John away and it didn't matter that they were obviously betas, they were taking John, and John was his, and Sherlock shouted the place down for a good three minutes, because it didn't seem worth spending his self control on shutting himself up.

After about a quarter of an hour they brought John back. His hair was wet and he was shivering and he was still naked. "Let me have a wash," he explained to Sherlock, "exactly what I needed."

Sherlock didn't need the pointed comment; he'd already assumed the cell was bugged. Apparently Moriarty was amusing himself. Sherlock was unlocked next, and without planning ahead he lunged between the two men straight at John and for a moment had his face against John's shoulder, then he was dragged out of the room, stunned at himself.

Moriarty stood and watched Sherlock shower, a permanent tiny smile at the corner of his mouth. Sherlock had no inborn body modesty and ignored him, and kept ignoring him when he took it on himself to towel Sherlock off like a body slave.

His clothes were not offered back to him. "Nudity? Really?" Sherlock asked. "You could at least try to surpass the level of an average middle-class nightmare."

"I'd say something about all those bits and pieces sewn into your linings that you're saving up for when I make a mistake and you need to pick your locks. But frankly, I'm just enjoying the scenery." Jim walked him back to the cell.

When John saw Sherlock's nudity and Moriarty with him, he surged to the limit of his chains. "Sherlock? Jesus, what -- " There was more panic in his voice than there had been for himself when they'd made him take his own clothes off the day before.

"He didn't even offer to scrub my back," Sherlock assured him.

"Saving that up," Moriarty promised. "We'll have all the time in the world."

"The rest of your life," Sherlock said pointedly as he was cuffed again. He'd squeezed what water he could from his hair, but cold drips were slipping down his spine and it was more irritating than it should be. More bloody hormones. When he'd stepped back into the room he'd caught the smell of John as if for the first time, and it was unsettlingly good.  There was nothing to hide his body's reaction; but as John seemed to be permanently half-hard in this state, at least he shouldn't be too offended.

Moriarty began to pace down the middle of the room, that aisle of space neither Sherlock nor John could quite reach, even if they decided to brave the bodyguard. "I've decided to join in," he announced.

"Yes?" Sherlock said, making sure he sounded bored and inattentive.

"Mmm. Cut my dosage, you see."

Sherlock's eyes met John, both of them realizing what dosage he had to be talking about. "Why do that? You're not interested in omegas," he managed.

"But I want to share everything with you, Sherlock," Jim purred, and then suddenly he whirled and pushed John down onto his cot on his stomach. John's eyes shut and his jaw clenched, forcing himself not to fight because the bodyguards had already taught him how very little that would get him. Moriarty certainly wouldn't have let them kill Sherlock, but between threats to John himself and the suggestion that a nonfatal bullet in Sherlock's arm or leg was still an option, John had learned to limit himself to minor acts of defiance.

Jim pulled a new pair of nitrile gloves from a pocket and theatrically snapped them onto his hands, then his hands were on John, stroking his newly clean back, his sides, the texture of the gloves sometimes slipping smoothly, sometimes catching and stuttering over John's skin. Very slowly, Jim bent his head over the nape of John's neck and sniffed. "Unsophisticated, but I can see why you might want a nibble," he pronounced, and pretended to bite at John's neck.

"Stop this," Sherlock said sharply. "Just stop. If it's me you want, we can negotiate -- "

"Sherlock!" John snapped, and Sherlock blinked, shocked John would react when he so clearly wanted to mentally absent himself as long as Jim's hands were on him.

"This _is_ negotiation, Sherlock," Jim said patiently. He stroked down, long caresses over John's flanks, then up to rest a proprietary hand on John's arse. Eyes locked on Sherlock's, he moved his hand slowly, slowly inward, until the side of his hand slipped between John's buttocks.

John's miserable gulp was audible.

Moriarty widened those dark eyes and raised other hand to his rounded lips, miming shock

"Are you hard, Johnny?" he whispered then, sawing the side of his hand slowly in the cleft. "You can smell the alpha in me, coming out. And Sherlock, _whew_ , five minutes out of the shower and he's on again. Isn't it _good_?"

John kept his silence, but the smell of him was stronger in the air and Sherlock shifted, trying to ignore his erection.

Jim wriggled the other hand in under John's hips, which jerked suddenly at the same time John made a choked grinding sound. Sherlock stared, seeing John's pelvis between Jim's surreally blue hands. The stereotype was that omegas had tiny cocks, but John's was perhaps just a bit smaller than the beta average. Jim's hand slid up and down on it and his other hand shifted relentlessly against John's arse.  

"He's hard, Sherlock. He's wet and he's hard and do you know, I think I'll just -- " He drew his upper hand back and pulled back all but the index and middle fingers, pointing dramatically with them aimed like a gun at John, posing as if he were doing some sort of martial arts posture. Then he stabbed the fingers forward.

John cried out and jerked and tried to twist away, and Sherlock, with a strangled curse, surged up off his own cot. He was still steps away at the absolute range of his chain, and the bodyguards inside and outside the room were both pointing their guns at him. He forced himself to sit. John was panting and writhing against the intrusion and at the same time the sight made Sherlock's throat thick, his cock was still shamefully hot and hard.

Jim saw. Smiling, eyes alight as if playing with the most engrossing toy in the world, Jim rode out John's struggles, keeping his fingers in place, until John stilled, quivering. "Ask me," he cooed to John, "ask me and I might touch your prostate, Johnny. Just ask."

"Piss off," John managed, his voice too blurred to be as defiant as he clearly meant.

Moriarty, with a patient, kindly smile, withdrew his fingers slightly -- they gleamed with wetness -- and stabbed them in again, making John gasp.

Jim, face coolly focused, like a man reading a dry textbook, went back to slowly masturbating John's cock, punctuating with harsh little thrusts of his fingers, until the time John gave a soft little cry and his hips snapped back.

Chuckling, Jim pulled both hands free and then, with an exaggerated moue of disgust peeled the gloves off and dropped them on the floor. At a nod from him, the bodyguard pointed his gun straight at John's head, where he lay on the cot, panting and shaking.

Sherlock sat perfectly still, seething, as Jim approached and stroked his bare thumb over Sherlock's lips. "I think I'm going to enjoy this, sharing him with you."

Sherlock was distantly aware, as the door closed them in again, that his eyes and throat felt too big and too hot and his heart was pounding. He was out of his depth in this. His natural behaviours were nearly always wrong when it came to people in pain. He'd learned to mimic some of what normal people did, but he had no models for this. He wasn't speaking. Should he be speaking?

John had sat up on his cot with his back to Sherlock. He wasn't speaking either.

Finally, without turning, John said, "Please don't do that. Don't try to get him molesting you instead, Sherlock, because if you think it through, once he's done with me he's done, and then I'll be just a wet stain on the wall. And it's pretty obvious now he's going to do it after all, but I personally think there's no such thing as a fate worse than death so, as long as I can live, I will, thanks."

"John -- "

"Because at least that way I can pretend to be a man."

John had suddenly wandered off the path into complete incomprehensibility. "What?"

"Do you even see what's going on here? I'm in heat."

"I had noticed," Sherlock snapped. He was all too aware.

"Well, maybe it doesn't look any different to you, but I don't think I'm actually always this much of a fucking cunt. I'm literally lying here, a dribbling arsehole. Like a sodding baby. I should be wearing a nappy."

John was usually so good at making sure Sherlock could follow the context of a conversation, but he wasn't trying anymore and Sherlock was reduced to responding utterance by utterance. "You're a doctor, John. You know it isn't -- "

"Oh, please, Sherlock, read out some poetry about the natural wonder of my cloaca. I've let my subscription to Open Arms fucking magazine lapse and I really need some new age shit about what a beautiful bird of fucking paradise I am." John's voice was thin and rough.

Sherlock doubted John had ever actually looked at the inside of a magazine like Open Arms, which invariably had cover photos of heavily pregnant omegas doing yoga or omegas jogging with a newborn in a pram. The fashion for referring to the omega's vent as a cloaca irritated Sherlock for its biological inaccuracy, but clearly to John the issue was much larger. "I didn't -- "

"I am a doctor, and it's not a cloaca and it's not a womb, it's my arsehole and it's for shitting out of, full stop. You don't understand, Sherlock, you can't. I'm a bloke. When I was fifteen and my body went haywire, I decided I could not be having with this crap, and I got on the meds and I've been a bloke ever since and I will not fucking go back to being -- _that_. To being a bag for sticking cocks in."

Sherlock stared at him. "You -- you date women, you seem to respect them. If this is how you feel -- "

"Women are _really_ not your bloody area, Sherlock, if you think women are omegas with tits. Women don't go into heat. Women get to decide. If a woman is raped, at least her body isn't fucking complicit."

John had said the word. Sherlock thought about Jim's neat little fingers and about what he could do to them with a pair of secateurs and that was a very nice thought indeed and helped settle him.

"Jim bloody Moriarty had his hands on me, Sherlock, and I couldn't stop it, I couldn't even not want it. It should be my choice, at least what to _want_. But omegas don't get a choice."

"Alphas are at the mercy of our hormones as well." Sherlock sat in the cell where his best -- his only -- friend had been digitally raped and felt his erection twitch at the tiny cascades of muscle movements whenever John shifted, and hated his body.

John shook his head, staring at the floor. "No, Sherlock. That's the point. You're at the mercy of mine. I'm the one doing this to myself, and I'm doing it to you too, and even to Moriarty. You don't want this, you'd never want me in a million years, but you're sitting there with an erection because my body is pumping out chemicals telling you to. I'm doing this to you -- to _you_ , Sherlock! -- and I can't stop it and I cannot stand that I am this fucking disgusting _thing_."

Sherlock stared, feeling raw pain, aching in his throat. He'd never imagined for a moment John feeling like this.

John covered his face with his hands for a long moment, shaking. "Fucking hormones. Sorry."

Sherlock still didn't know what to say. All he could think of was something about how a million years was a very long time, and that probably wouldn't go over well.

It occurred to him that it would be good, just now, to kiss John. Not to grab him and take him and have him and fuck him, but to just put his mouth against John's and give himself softly over. This was almost certainly his hormones. The hormones were twisting his perfectly sensible homicidal responses into this absurd urge for physical contact.

 


	3. Saliva

Sherlock slept fitfully for a few hours and was woken by the sound of John trying to stifle his groans. It was a piteous sound. John was curled into a tight lump of misery on the middle of his cot.

"John?" Sherlock tried.

With a grunt, John rolled off the cot, knees landing on the floor, chest resting on the thin mattress. His knees were apart, his thighs gleamed. He was presenting. "I can't take this. Please, I can't -- please. You've got to."

Sherlock struggled out to the limit of his chain before he really knew what he was doing. John scooted backwards, reaching the limit of his own. The result was absurd, nearly two meters of empty space between them.

Sherlock got hold of himself. "I can't reach you."

John, on his hands and knees on the floor, whined low in his throat. "Please. God, please, please, please. I need it. Sherlock, I need it." His hips jerked back helplessly.

"I know." Sherlock needed it too. Air on his skin felt obscene and hot. The sight of John like this had brought him fully erect and his knot was beginning just slightly to swell. He tugged uselessly at the cuffs until the pain of it in his arms distracted him.

"Please," John whispered, and shook with a silent sob. John, who was so strong, so resilient, so good, drugged by his own body and reduced to this.

"John," he said suddenly, sharply. "Listen to me. I want you to put your hand on yourself."

"What?" John asked, sounding bewildered.

"Your hand, John. On your cock."

"It isn't my cock I'm worried about now, thanks," John bit out.

"Trust me, John." After a moment, John knelt up, not looking at Sherlock, and hesitantly cupped himself.

"I want you to wet your other hand," Sherlock said. His voice sounded strangely normal, his own deep, steady voice, while his mind was racing just ahead trying to find the right ideas, the right words. "Get it very wet, John. Very, very wet."

John wiped his hand through the lubrication leaking from him. He was getting it all over, and Sherlock knew what he was expecting. "It won't help," he whispered. "I tried it, when I had my first heats. Everyone does. It doesn't work."

"Is your palm wet, John?"

"For fuck's sake."

"Sit on the cot and shut your eyes."

John obediently moved back up onto the cot and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Your hand needs to be very wet, John, because I promise you, inside my mouth it is _very_ wet. Put it on your cock."

John's eyes flew open. "Sherlock -- "

"Listen to me. Shut your eyes. That hand is my mouth. Put it on your cock. Do it." John, eyes shut again, closed the hand on his erection with a shudder. "That's my mouth on you, John. You're sliding into my mouth." Build a sense-image to increase John's arousal, using words that also implied what John needed to hear but would not accept explicitly. It was a puzzle, a game, and for a moment both of them could be a little bit distracted, and that was all Sherlock could hope for.

"Sherlock, this isn't -- "

"Focus on my mouth, John, feel it." Cut him off before he could get caught up in matters of sexual designation.  "I'm -- I'm on my knees. I'm on my knees taking it, sliding my mouth down." Implications: John in the superior position, Sherlock low and moving lower, just a mouth, with no important associated gender.

John made a strangled sound, his hand sliding slowly.

"I've never done this before. I'll probably choke, trying to take all of you. Squeeze tight, John, because I'm sucking." Implications: John in a position of experience and therefore power, John's cock of considerable size, not a mere omega afterthought.

"Christ. God. _Sherlock_."

Sherlock silently decided to view that as a progression in increasing order, and smiled slightly.

"My hair's long enough you can take it in handfuls, John. You can grab on, fuck my mouth, hard as you want. Force me to take -- "

The implications of power, control were obvious, relevant, and apparently very badly applied. John's eyes opened again, looking at Sherlock with a fairly horrified expression. His hand had gone still and lax. "Shit. No, Sherlock. No!"

So much for self-congratulation. Sherlock made a desperate course correction, "Or you could be very gentle with me. It's up to you, John. You know I've never let anyone else do this, you could be kind. Let me suckle you. Let me learn how to use my tongue on you. It is what I want." Now that he thought about it, this aspect was obvious, knowing John; he'd been dense not to factor in John's kindness and compulsive caretaking, and criminally stupid to forget that John would be especially sensitive to the idea of coercion.

After a long moment John, quivering, shut his eyes and started again.

"It's what I want, John. Sucking you. Tasting you."

John moved his hand, first slowly, then more frantic.

And now they were into the difficult bit, running up against Sherlock's lack of actual experience. Short of ridiculously chanting 'up and down' over and over, what could one say at this point? He gazed at John, looking for something he could spin out into more filthy talk: the sweat across his collarbones, the flushed skin of his chest, the way his other hand clutched at a handful of mattress, all the little muscle motions.

"I can feel the muscles in your thighs jumping, John. You're controlling yourself, making sure it isn't too much for me." Was he overplaying this? Probably, but from what he knew dirty talk was meant to be a bit overblown. "Do you want me to move faster? Should I try to take you deeper?"

His only answer was a low moan, and John's hips rocking.

"Move your thumb, John. I'm licking at the head of you." John's hand shook as he stilled it and stroked with his thumb. "You're all salt and heat. I've got to suck you. My lips are tight round the crown, sucking hard. And now I'm taking more of you. All I can take."

He dropped his voice to it's lowest register. "Fuck my mouth, John. _Mmm_ \--"

And John gasped and cried out and came. He fell back onto the mattress cursing. "Fuck. Sherlock. Oh god. Oh fucking christ. Sherlock. What the hell?"

"I trust that took the edge off a bit," Sherlock said. It had distracted John from his heat for whole minutes. And more importantly, it had cast John firmly back in the role of the man, of the one in control, of the one doing the penetrating. All in all, even taking his mid-stream blunder into account, it was the most successful thing Sherlock had managed in days.

"You're mad as a hatter, you know that?" John didn't even raise his head from the mattress.

"You tell me so often enough."

"Do I tell you often enough what a brilliant fucking bastard you are? Christ, I was not expecting that."

"I do try to exceed expectations."

"You work in a pretty fucking mysterious way your wonders to perform, I'll say that for you."

They might have laughed. Just a bit, just for a moment, they might have laughed.

The door opened. "Oh boys," Moriarty said, "have you been playing without me? Naughty."

 

\---


	4. Sweat

Moriarty was in trainers, shorts, and a white cotton vest with great patches dark with sweat. His hair stood in wet quills. "You interrupted me in the middle of raquetball," he announced, "To be honest, I think they let me win, but you can't blame them for that can you? I mean, really?" He was breathless and Sherlock thought that beneath the mock-annoyance he read real anger.

He should have taken the bugs into account, considered how Moriarty would respond to the things he'd been saying to John. But John had smashed his concentration and he hadn't been thinking properly at all.

Jim walked over to where John had sat up on his cot. He stripped the vest off over his head, dropped it on the floor. Then he shucked his shorts, leaving dark blue cotton pants, also damp with sweat. "Over," he commanded. "Now. On your belly."

Hot flesh and sweat -- the room suddenly stank with alpha, acrid and unacceptable.

John swallowed. "How about you fuck off out of it?" But whatever good Sherlock had done by bringing John off, it all seemed to be evaporating in the face of this new wave of pheromones.

Jim leaned down and whispered something in John's ear. It was too low to catch and the tilt of his head made it impossible to read his lips. His sweaty cheek slid against John's. Then he rose again. "Your choice, John."

John turned over slowly, and Sherlock knew that whatever the threat had been, Jim's alpha-scented sweat was helping tip him into compliance.

When John was lying on the cot, Jim stretched out on top of him, skin to skin, the lump of his cock in his cotton pants pressed to John's arse. Jim, settling, crossed his arms on John's shoulders and rested his head on them. He looked like a man getting comfortable, tanning his back on a tropical beach. He smiled at Sherlock but it was edged with fury. "Got bored, did you, Sherlock?"

"You know how I like games," Sherlock tried.

"Not a nice game, was it Sherlock? Teasing this cunt. Making him think he could ever get an alpha on his knees."

Sherlock leaned forward. "You were out. Playing racquetball. Now . . . we could play instead." If he could just get Moriarty's focus back off of John. "I promise I won't let you win."

"Don't, Sherlock," John warned.

"We'll play later," Jim promised. "I'm all comfy here."

Then he moved his forearms to the surface of the cot's thin mattress and lowered his head to put his mouth at John's ear and start whispering again.

"Piss off," John managed. After another whisper, "No. Shut it. I don't -- " He went suddenly still as Jim went on whispering.

Jim began to move on top of John, first just shifting as if for the best position, but then an unmistakeable rocking of his hips. "Get off!" John complained, but the anger in his voice was washing away and being replaced with something else.

Jim squeezed John's shoulders in his hands and swooped his head around to the other ear to whisper again.

After a moment John went quiet and limp on the bed. "Yeah. Yes. I -- I get it. You can bloody stop -- "

John shut up, but Jim went on whispering, first in one ear, then the other, all the time doing his slow writhe.

Sherlock picked his moment carefully. "It's got to be hard to take your work seriously," he remarked to the bodyguard, "when he tells you to go in shooting and all you can think about is what a bloody twat he looked writhing around like a sixth former trying to get off by staring at page three."

Jim raised his head and sighed. "Nice try," he allowed. He slid off John and grinned at Sherlock. His cock was hard in his pants. "Some employees, that might've worked. But you've got no idea on this one. Wrong tree in the wrong forest, I'm afraid."

He tapped impatiently at John's shoulder. Slowly, almost dreamily, John sat up on the side of the cot. He was hard too.

"I'd like you to lick me, Johnny," Jim said, adjusting his stance so Sherlock had a clear view. "Would you like to do that? Have a nice taste of alpha sweat?"

John took an unsteady breath and then ground out. "Yes. I want to taste you."

"Good boy. Get to work."

John leaned forward and licked up between Jim's pectorals, up to his collarbone, then across.

"Oh dear," Sherlock deadpanned. "John how could you? It hasn't even occurred to me that Jim just spent the last ten minutes whispering threats in your ear to make you do this." When Jim's eyes met his, Sherlock rolled his eyes disgustedly.

Jim smiled lazily. "Aren't you a clever boy. Nipples, Johnny."

After a shudder, John licked at Jim's right nipple, then his left. Sherlock gritted his teeth. Nothing could stop him imagining John's mouth on him instead. His own nipples had gone tight.

"Mmm," Jim hummed, sleepy-eyed. "Get on with it."

John licked down. His face was bright red and miserable. Sherlock could read the panic in the tensed muscles around his eyes and his tightly fisted hands.

Sherlock could think of nothing he could say that would make this less difficult, and perhaps it was kinder not to remind John there was a witness. Theatrics, he reminded himself. Moriarty was all about theatrics. Wait it out and he would get bored and go away.

John went on down, down, licked into the navel. His lower lip was against the coarse dark hair that trailed down from there.

Jim wriggled with a happy smile. "Now suck my cock-sweat, you cunt," he snapped suddenly, face contorting momentarily into demonic anger.

John's body seemed to jam up as his resistance finally got the better of him. He made a strangled sound of outrage. Sherlock kept his hands fisted at his sides, jaw clenched to stay quiet. Whatever Moriarty had threatened John with, John was taking it seriously. What good would voicing Sherlock's impotent anger do?

Jim was smiling again. "Do you want your reward, Johnny? Or you can have your punishment instead . . . "

John cursed a quiet garble of obscenity and then tilted his head and put his open mouth over Jim's cotton-covered erection. Sherlock couldn't stop his own shocked grunt.

"Suck it," Jim reminded. John sucked. Jim's head tipped back with a sigh of bliss, rolled side to side, then he looked down at John, dark eyes heavy-lidded and dreamy. "Good boy, John. Good." For just a moment Jim didn't seem to be playing a game, just genuinely enjoying John's mouth on him.

Sherlock felt dizzy.

Then Jim's expression cleared. His hands cupped around John's head and he gave a few mock thrusts, grinning at Sherlock. Then he pulled himself back and shoved John away from him.

John bent double, breathing hard. Jim shoved at him until he got up onto his hands and knees on the cot. Sherlock could see the lubrication shining on his thighs and on his cock, an omega's overactive glands trying to make everything as slick as possible. For a hazy moment Sherlock could think only of slamming himself into John, forcing away this unforgivable smell of another alpha on his skin. It felt so necessary that he could hardly comprehend that it wasn't already happening.

Barely half his attention was engaged as Moriarty raised his hand, and a racquet was handed from outside the door to the bodyguard inside, from him to Moriarty. "Do you think you can manage to count to twenty, or is that beyond you?" he asked John, tapping the racquet against his palm lightly.

It was enough of a jolt to bring Sherlock crashing back into reality. "No!" Sherlock shouted. "He did everything you asked." Could Moriarty actually do it? An alpha, beat the omega he'd been rutting against only a moment earlier? But Jim was truly insane. And still partly medicated. And enough of a sadist he might simply consider this sexplay, however much damage he did.

"But Sherlock, he's earned his reward, and an alpha ought to take care of an omega," Jim said, smirking to acknowledge that he'd followed Sherlock's thoughts. He walked around to the other side of the cot and swung the racquet in a sharp, efficient arc into John's buttock.

"One," John ground out.

"Stop!"

Jim rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. "Tell him, John. This is what you want."

"Leave it, Sherlock. This is what I wa-- " the next thwack of the racket on flesh only made him pause and blink for a moment. "What I want. Two."

"I let him choose, Sherlock. You can't say fairer than that," Jim said, posing with the racquet raised. "This is the reward." His face slowly pulled into a manic pumpkin grin. "Punishment was: I'd do it to _you_."

"God _damn_ it, John!" Sherlock roared.

Jim laughed and beat John's arse fast, harsh, vicious, as John counted. The racquet struck over and over just where a mounting alpha's body would smack against John's with every thrust, like a parody of what Sherlock was aching to do. By fifteen John's voice sounded far away. At twenty he collapsed on his stomach on the cot, panting and shivering.

"I'm going to kill you," Sherlock whispered. It felt more like a realization than a threat.

Jim shook his head, as if to dismiss an absurdity. "Look at him, Sherlock. That's all he is, a fucking omega, dripping and fucked-out and stinking of me." He reversed the racquet in his hands and pushed the handle between John's thighs, probing idly.

John whimpered.

"Would you like some more, John?" Jim whispered. He reached down to slip his fingers between John's abused buttocks. His eyes looked black and hungry, he was pressing inside and John was groaning.

Sherlock's breath was coming quick. His hands were shaking. There was a high sound in his ears. "You haven't been paying me much attention, Jim. I thought you were only interested in alphas, but you spent the whole time humping at John's leg." If he would only come close, come in reach, and then blood would trump the stink of alpha.

It took several seconds for Jim to look up from John's body and over to him. He looked bewildered. He snatched his wet hand back from John as if he hadn't known it was there.

"Come over here, Jim, give me the racquet. Let's play." Sherlock calculated exactly the motion that would crack off part of the racquet rim against the cot's frame, leaving him with a sharpened U of wood ideal for stabbing both Jim's eyes out at the same time.

No actual hope of that, but Jim's attention had finally left John. "Oh Sherlock," he said, seeming to get himself under control. "You are going to be so much _work_." He was still breathing hard as he walked out. The bodyguard cleared up the discarded clothes and followed.

For several breaths, Sherlock could only stare at the door, sorting through a dozen violent scenarios. Then he remembered what was important. John's breath had slowed, but he still lay where Moriarty had left him, arse and thighs red and promising bruises. John being hurt when he could do nothing about it was bewildering, made no sense. The world was not working properly.

"John?"

"Shut up. Don't ... I can't talk to you now."

No. John did not get to speak to him like that. And it had been John who had let the beating happen, worked for it, put his mouth on that bastard for it. Sherlock walked to the limit of his chain, "You idiot. What the hell were you thinking, John?"

John raised his head enough to glare. "Sorry, did I stutter? I said, shut up." His face went back into the mattress. Sherlock could sense Jim rising like a miasma from the skin of John's back, from all of John. He'd licked, licked Jim's sweat, taken it into him. And John's mouth on Jim's cock. This was unacceptable.

"What goes through your mind when you do these things? Do you think you're helping? Were you trying to impress him? That was pointless, self-destructive -- "

John turned on his side, legs drawn up to hide himself as best he could, but at least no longer cringing against the mattress. "You are an ungrateful shit."

"Yes. I am ungrateful. I feel no gratitude at all for your moronic gesture. You let a sadist with no impulse control, who hates you, get started beating you. You are unbelievably lucky that he stopped at all."

"You'd rather I let him do it to you."

"Were you relying on your alpha not being able to hurt you? When his psychosis so obviously overrides his biology?"

John shifted and sat up, wincing. "He is not my alpha. Do not say that to me."

"You stink of him. His pheromones must have addled whatever brains you started off with, or you'd have realized he'd kill you but he's too obsessed to actually damage me."

"You are so naive, Sherlock. You've got it all backward. I'm furniture, he's not going to lose his mind and murder a couch. But you -- he's fucking demented to start with, and you turn him into the mad hatter of axe murder. You reject him one time too many and he'll just snap and -- why are we even talking about this?"

"Because you are an idiot, and you are not listening." Sherlock seethed. So John thought that if he went up against Jim he would lose, did he? The complete cretin, the little fool, why could he never think things through properly? Why did he always get it wrong?

"No, I'm not listening. Because this is just the way it is, Sherlock. Every time I get the choice about who gets manhandled by the maniac, I choose me."

"How noble of you. Do you imagine you're the only one living through this? Did it even occur to you that I should have some say?"

"Oddly enough, no. I was distracted by the maniac whispering about beating you bloody. And just for once, maybe I needed to have some choice, some control in this situation."

"You need a lot, John," Sherlock snapped. "You need his cock, don't you? You'd beg him to pound himself against the bruises right now if he'd just fuck you."

He whirled back to his cot, picked up the thin mattress, twisted and strained and finally tore the cover in one long rip, revealing felted layers of grey stuffing inside. He flung it away from him; it was completely unsatisfying. He needed something that would smash, shatter. "I'll kill him. He's never going to have you. I'll kill you both first."

Had he said that? He had. Probably even John couldn't forgive him for something like that. He panted, staring at John and waiting for the reaction.

John stood up, wincing for a moment before he got himself military straight, and nodded. "Good."

Sherlock twitched. "What did you say?"

"You're right. I'm ready to beg to be fucked. I want it. I can't help it, I can't stop wanting it. But not him. I can at least not want it to be him. I can want it to be you."

"John -- " His voice had gone croaky.

John looked immovable as bedrock. "I told you. I need to have some choice in this. I can't choose not to want, but I can choose you." He shook his head. "I can't imagine saying that to any other man in the world."

The words stunned him. Cutting through his rage came something Sherlock thought might be pride, if there was such a thing as pride you didn't have to haul over your shoulders like armor and parade in front of the world. And it was cruel because this thing, if it was pride, had turned to shit in his hands. "Don't, John."

"I'm taking you at your word, Sherlock. He's never going to have me. It'll be you."

"If I fuck you," Sherlock said, his voice shaking with his fury, "you'll be covered in my scent. You'll love it, you'll search it out, you'll never feel quite right unless you can smell me on you. If I fuck you, you won't have any kind of choice, you'll never want to leave me. Whatever terrible things I do, however sick I am, however bad I get, you'll stay." He choked on something that felt like a hot mace in his throat. "I deserved to _earn_ that, John. I deserved to impress you and manipulate you and compromise, if I had to, to make you stay just a little while longer. For me. Not because you needed my knot." His eyes were burning. "I deserved the chance to earn you."

"Jesus, Sherlock," John whispered. " _Don't_. God, don't."

"Shut up, John." His voice was too raw and too close to a yell.

"It's the hormones. All that bastard's pheromones in the room. You know that. Jesus, Sherlock, stop, It's not worth -- "

"You are," Sherlock rasped. "You're an idiot, and I am a genius and my opinion is a lot more informed than yours." He couldn't care about the wetness on his face, couldn't pay it any mind. It was the rage, doing this, making him like this, making him say these things. "How dare you? How dare you call yourself disgusting? How dare you let him beat you? You're mine. Not because you're an omega, not because I'm an alpha. Because I know everything there is to know about you and I still can't wait every day to see what you'll do. And -- and I fucking _need_ you. John. I need you."

He sagged at the end of his chains. The rage had deserted him, and left him boneless and hopeless and with tears on his cheeks.

"I was never going to leave," John said quietly. "That was never even a question. God, you've no idea, do you? You're right, it isn't you being an alpha; it was never about that. It's just you, Sherlock. It would kill me to give you up. You're my life. And, yeah, this is the hormones talking because I never in a fucking million years would have said this shit out loud, but it was always true. Fucking me -- even _him_ fucking me -- won't make a difference; I'm your man, no matter what."

He looked so fragile, Sherlock couldn't help thinking. Not delicate, but brittle, like a sheet of marble that one strike with a hammer would shatter. John was holding it together now only because Sherlock had fallen apart. His skin looked so warm, and Sherlock needed, just needed to touch it. He wasn't angry anymore, he just needed to be touching John's skin.

And then John would smell right again, and everything would be better.

 

\---


	5. Blood

For a long time Sherlock had lain curled up on his torn mattress on the floor, both of them quiet. They'd been brought water and deli sandwiches, and Sherlock had taken note of John's expression and decided eating would be easier than dealing with the fallout if he refused.

Hesitantly, John had tried to start a pointless conversation about the sub-par sandwiches, and Sherlock had gamely narrowed them down to having come from one of three shops, none of which he ever bothered with, but the talk limped along and eventually fell away.

After the food, Sherlock curled on his mattress again, still on the floor, and John on his cot.

It was all going on too long. He'd felt like he was about to crawl out of his own skin for over two full days now, and like anything it had eventually faded into the background, become something he was used to, the way some people learned to live with the stench of refuse or animals, no longer smelling it unless reminded.

The idiot engine of reproduction in his body kept spurring him now and then, but it was running down with all his other energy. One simply could not stay at the peak of tension forever.

At the moment he hadn't even the energy to be embarrassed by his outburst earlier. Despite the confusion of scents in the air and the inescapable constant sexual awareness of John, he was flaccid when he fell asleep.

A few hours later they woke, and were taken, one after the other, to use a lav and have another shower. This time Moriarty didn't come watch him, and the water beating on his skin seemed to waken Sherlock a bit.

When they brought him back to the cell, he immediately noticed that John smelled only like himself again. Their eyes met and at once John's breath came faster. Sherlock felt immediately aroused, and didn't care how the guards smirked at his erection while they chained him.

While he'd been out, someone had swapped in a new, untorn mattress and cleared up the bits of fluff that had fallen out of the old one. Sherlock picked the new mattress up and slid it across to John, then sat crosslegged on the floor with his back against one of the legs of the cot.

"What's this?" John asked. His voice was warm.

"Add it to your cot," Sherlock directed.

John grinned. "This is you being an alpha, is it? Taking care of my comfort?"

"Yes."

John's smile went sad and tender. "This is going to be bad," he said.

Sherlock nodded. For all the gap between his intelligence and John's, John sometimes followed his thoughts and his mood so perfectly.

"Do we say goodbye now?" John's tone was almost too gentle to stand.

Sherlock looked into John's eyes that were secretly blue. "I'd rather not."

"Okay." John nodded as if agreeing to a battle plan. "We wait."

Sherlock nodded again.

John pushed the mattress back to him. "The ticking on that one's got pink stripes. I cannot be having with pink stripes on my bed, Sherlock. People will get the wrong idea."

It was weak and in remarkably poor taste and made Sherlock chuckle and that made John chuckle. "Christ," John said, shaking his head and smiling for just a moment more. "Live forever, you glorious bastard."

Before Sherlock could say anything back, the door opened.

Moriarty was back in his suit, but in the doorway he theatrically unbuttoned and shrugged out of his jacket, and handed it to the guard outside, who took it like a valet. Jim strolled in, rolling up his sleeves. He was sleek and clean and not at all sweaty and still he smelled too strongly of alpha.

Sherlock went immediately on edge, and it only got worse when he saw how John's nostrils twitched when Jim neared him. A row of facts he hadn't been aware of lining up tipped one into another in his mind like dominoes and crashed into a nasty conclusion. In his annoyance earlier, Jim had not only come in to overwhelm John with an overabundance of alpha smell in the air, to make him actually lick alpha pheromones off Jim's skin, Jim had been all but naked himself, no gloves between his fingers and John's wetness. Jim wasn't as impervious as he thought he was, and that could turn out to be bad for everyone.

"Did you miss me, Sherlock?" Jim asked, but it was John he was staring at.

"Were you away?"  

"You missed me, didn't you Johnny?" Moriarty said, stroking John's hair as if he were a dog.

John twitched his head away. "Never. Give me a gun and see if I'm lying."

Jim looked over his shoulder at Sherlock, squeezing up his face into a chipmunk grin. "He's _soo_ violent. It's adorable. Is that how you picked him, out of all the puppies in the box?"

"Yes," John answered for him. "I shot a cabbie for him and followed him home."

"Now that really was a singular shot," Jim commented. He was gazing at John in an alarming way. He picked up John's hand -- clink of cuff against chain -- and stroked John's trigger finger for a moment before John snatched his hand back. "But let's be honest, it wouldn't have been necessary if you'd picked the right door in the first place, would it?"

"You had someone watching," Sherlock said, "even then. Would someone else have shot Hope, if John hadn't come to rescue me?"

Moriarty's distractibility was an advantage as often as it was a danger. He turned, taking his focus off John. Sherlock made sure not to look at John, though at last glance he'd been starting to blush across the cheekbones, his heat intensifying now he had an alpha pawing at him again.

"It isn't a game if you can't lose, Sherlock." He smiled slowly, that smile that invited Sherlock into a circle that included only the two of them. "You've realized, of course. How distracted you're making me."

Sherlock didn't point out that it was actually John who was distracting him.

"It's even interfering with business now. I think your dear brother very nearly got the better of me for a few seconds this morning." He grinned. "Nearly."

Sherlock hoped he was keeping every tell off his face. He knew from a lifetime of experience that when Mycroft seemed to have lost by inches, that usually meant Mycroft was simply being subtle about winning.

"I could put my dosage back up, of course."

"But it isn't a game if you can't lose," Sherlock echoed. He was walking a terrible line here. Getting Moriarty back on his meds would protect John, but if his distraction really was putting him at a disadvantage against Mycroft, that might be the only hope they had.

"Exactly. Maybe I'll hold back or maybe . . . " He gazed at Sherlock dreamily. "Maybe I won't."

Jim strolled around, stroked John's hair again. "Canines are the other species that knots."

"Yes," Sherlock said, worried that he was suddenly not following, worried that John was not yet pulling away from the caress.

"When I first learned about sex, I wished we worked more like dogs and wolves. A bone in the cock, sticking it in first, becoming hard after, the knot swelling only later on. Think about the control you could learn, putting it in an omega and staying there, staying there, not letting yourself harden, not letting yourself knot. He'd sob and writhe and plead and you'd pull out again, leaving him to beg."

"Alphas have no baculum; they need an erection to penetrate." John said, in a rather distracted voice.  "The knot rises in response to omega phermones."

Jim grabbed John's jaw, forcing his face up. "We know. We know what you're doing to us, you slut." His hand shifted down to squeeze John's throat, pushing him back. "You cunt." He climbed onto John, knee on either side of him, sitting on his stomach on the cot. Sherlock couldn't see but he knew Jim's hands were both on John's throat. "All that poison, pumping from your dripping arse into the air."

John struggled, choking.

"Stop it!" Sherlock yelled.

"The only reason I haven't killed you is because I want Sherlock to finally see for himself," Jim hissed down at John. Then he pulled back, John panting under him, and after a moment climbed off.

"I like you on your back, John," he said. "Lie down properly."

Shaking, John shifted to lie full length on his back on the cot. He looked at Sherlock and all Sherlock could do was look back.

Meanwhile, Moriarty nodded to his bodyguard, who passed him an old-fashioned black medical bag and then pointed his gun at John's head from a distance of three steps.

Moriarty dropped the bag casually on the cot below John's feet and opened it up. He took out a length of rubber surgical tubing and what Sherlock thought for a moment were scissors, before recognizing a clamp. He placed them on John's belly and then opened his palm to the bodyguard, who gave him a small bunch of keys.

Jim unlocked one of John's hands from the cuffs and stretched it over his head toward the leg of the cot. He wrapped the stretchy surgical tubing around John's wrist and clamped it off.

Then he retrieved a second length of tubing and clamp, and secured John's other wrist.

It was shocking, how much more helpless John looked with his arms like that than he had been with them simply cuffed in front of him.

Jim pulled out a third tube, a third clamp, and slipped the tube under John's head.

"Don't -- " Sherlock begged weakly, uselessly. The gun was so visibly close to John, he couldn't ignore it.

It took only a moment, then the tube was wrapped round John's neck with the clamp holding it. It wasn't tight enough to be an immediate danger, but from John's sudden frightened shifting and harsh panting it was tight enough to restrict his breathing a bit.

"What's the point of this?" Sherlock asked.

"When you've got an actual doctor to hand, it seems a bit of a waste not to play doctor with him," Jim said. "Now that I might actually breed him, I think a proper examination is in order, don't you? Of course, I already know he's clean. He always wears a condom with his women, did you know that, Sherlock? Does he think he's fooling them about what he is, or is it self-delusion?"

It was possible for some omegas to produce enough sperm to impregnate a woman, but unlikely. "John's very conscientious," Sherlock said.

"So am I. I wanted you to know, so you wouldn't think I was risking anything playing with him like this. I'll still be quite clean for you, when the time comes."

Much as the idea nauseated Sherlock, he clutched at it. "I'd begun to think you'd lost interest, Jim. You never seem to want to touch me anymore. No toys in your bag for me?"

"Stop it, Sherlock," John rasped. His face was very red.

Jim smiled slowly. "If Sherlock so much as twitches," he said to his bodyguard, "spray any brains John has all over the room, will you?"

He walked over to Sherlock and rested one hand on his bare shoulder. "Hmm. At the moment you smell less than appetizing, my dear," He murmured. "That's the influence of the slut, of course. But without him your knot wouldn't rise, so we'll just take advantage of that while we can." He dropped flexibly into a crouch and put his hand on Sherlock's cock.

Sherlock gasped. He'd been hard for so long, and hadn't been able to bring himself to touch. This first caress reverberated agonizingly through him, and yet the stink of alpha so close cut through the arousal.

Instead of his face, Jim's eyes stayed on Sherlock's erection. His gaze was soft, almost tender, and as he stroked slowly up and down he let out a little sigh. Then he wrapped his fingers around the knot and squeezed firmly.

Sherlock had seldom had the chance to see his own knot as anything but a very slight spongy bulge at the base of his cock. Now, in John's presence, it was a red swollen lump.  If he pushed it into John's body, it would force the vent to reconfigure, closing off the intestinal sphincters and opening the pseudo-cervix.  It would lock them together, long enough for hyperejaculation to finish without leakage.  Yet another sloppy and ineffective gambit as evolution tried to beat the stacked odds against an alpha and an omega actually managing successful procreation.  

The squeeze of Jim's hand made the knot plump yet more and sent a jolt of shocked pleasure through Sherlock's body. His hips jerked and his hands clawed at his thigh.

"That doesn't count," Jim drawled immediately, and Sherlock stared in horror at the gun, realizing what he might have caused.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, eyes meeting John's. John's face was darker red, but he just gave Sherlock an understanding nod.

"Quite all right," Jim said. "I take it as a compliment." He patted Sherlock's cheek and then returned to John.

From the bag he now pulled a flat packet of thin plastic, about as long as a pencil. He tore it open and pulled out a little disposable scalpel.

Sherlock started squeezing his hand down as narrow as he could. The cuffs were too tight, it wasn't going to be a matter of dislocating his thumb, he would have to crush the bones of his hand to get it out of the cuff, but he would do it.

"Didn't I _say_ I'm not going to kill him?" Jim said, without looking at him. "I just want to play, Sherlock, and I'm afraid you still need a little extra incentive."

He bent forward and made a tiny cut just over John's hip. John winced but didn't make a sound.

"I did say he's clean," Jim reminded Sherlock, and then put his mouth to the cut and sucked at it.

John froze, looking utterly shocked.

After a moment Jim raised his head. There was a little red -- deliberately, Sherlock was sure -- visible on his lower lip. "They say there are pheromones even in the blood. Call it raising the stakes. Here's your incentive, Sherlock: Touch yourself. Hands on your cock. Every time you stop, I'll take another little taste."

He glanced at Sherlock, and then put the scalpel against John's thigh.

Sherlock put his hand hurriedly on his cock and moved up and down, making the chains clink.

Jim moved the scalpel away and put it on the mattress next to the bag. "Good. Enjoy it. Oh, and Sherlock?" Jim's eyes met his, and his face did one of those terrifying slow transitions from cheerful mayhem to demonic hate and rage. "If you come before I say so, I'll slice off something unnecessary. Like his cock."

"Jesus," John breathed.

Jim dragged his hand through the bag, making things rattle and clank and rustle, and pulled out another clamp. He took one of John's nipples between his fingers and tugged it out, rolled it slowly, and then leaned in and sucked on it. John's nipples were wide, pale, barely darker than the skin around them. After a moment he drew back, and while John made a swallowed sound of protest, the clamp closed on the nipple and stayed there. John writhed a little, and his troubled breathing got worse.

"I don't hear you enjoying this, Sherlock," Jim remarked.

Biting his lip, Sherlock stroked himself. "John -- "

"I'm okay," John managed. "I'm okay." His head shook back and forth as he learned to take the pain. Finally he grinned fiercely up at Jim. "You realize you're going to have to work harder to come up with anything a thousand medical students haven't already thought of, right?"

Sherlock's hand stuttered over the head of his cock and he shuddered. John had always been this: brave and gorgeous and singular. And his.

Jim grinned and gave the clamp a half-twist until John yelped.

Despite Jim's new intensity and his bag of toys, Sherlock had taken some comfort in the fact that he'd put John on his back. For all Jim's talk of losing control, the position seemed to make it less likely Jim was actually about to rape John.

Then Jim grabbed both John's ankles and forcibly bent him in half. John hissed as his knees pressed his chest, shifting the clamp again, and then his legs parted a bit so his knees were nearly at his underarms, as his body refused to stretch further.

"Not as flexible as you might be, Johnny, getting on a bit," Jim commented, shoving hard, forcing the stretch. "Keep them up. This is perfect."

He walked back to Sherlock to take in John's position. "Omegas sometimes insist on this position, you know," he commented. "They say being face-to-face is more personal, more intimate, less animal. I suppose all the alphas are too pheromone-drugged to tell them how it looks. Sort of like a clam, don't you think, Sherlock?"

It was not, admittedly, the most dignified position John had ever been in, and from the expression on his face he was painfully aware. Indignity would be as hard on John as pain, maybe worse.

"I said, what do you think, Sherlock?" Jim prompted.

Sherlock took a risk. "I'd be more impressed by your aesthetic critique if you weren't so hard."

The front of Jim's trousers were indeed swollen out with his erection.

"We could just sit here and enjoy him, Jim," he suggested. "I'll put my hand on you, if you like. I haven't seen your knot yet." He let his voice go deeper. "Let me see you, Jim. Isn't that what this is all about? Really?"

Jim gazed at him. "I wish you meant it," he said quietly. His eyes were so sad, genuinely sad. "I really do. But you're just saying these things so I'll leave your pet omega alone. You still don't see what he is. Someday, Sherlock. Someday." He swallowed with what Sherlock was uncomfortably aware was real emotion, and then went back to John.

This time from the bag he pulled out a grey plastic dildo. It was on the small side, smaller than John's own cock, and with no lump to imitate a knot. It did have a dial at the end, which meant it was the sort that vibrated.

Jim held it up, presumably so John could see, and then lowered it between John's thighs, rubbing it around to collect his secretions.

Then, eyes intent, he slipped it into the cleft of John's arse and wriggled it there.

John panted.

Jim pressed it, moved it, twisted it, teasing, until John's body began to shift a little.

Jim shoved it inside.

John moaned and twisted and tried to get his breath. His face had gone dangerously dark.

Face an avid deaths-head grin, Jim fucked John with the dildo, in and out, now smooth, now jabbing.

John's scent rose in an overwhelming cloud.

Sherlock groaned. John's head turned to look at him, saw him hunched over his working hand, his damp, twitching cock.

"John -- " he ground out. "I -- I -- "

"S'okay -- " John gasped. "Just don't -- don't come, for Christ's sake. Pretty good cock -- might -- might want to use it again sometime."

Sherlock helplessly coughed out a sort of laugh and wanted, more at that moment than he wanted to come or to be inside John or to kill Jim, to kiss John's foolish clever lovely mouth.

The exchange had not pleased Jim. He pulled the dildo free and walked up the bed. He opened the clamp on the tube around John's throat, pulled it slightly tighter, and clamped it again.

John struggled helplessly.

"Jim -- Jim please!" Sherlock begged.

Jim grabbed the dildo up, stabbed it into John, and twisted the base. It buzzed loudly. He jerked it around inside John until John's whole body arched and twisted and he gushed new lubrication. John tried to scream but couldn't get enough air. The vibrating end must be pressing against his prostate.

Jim's burning gaze fixed on Sherlock, who quickly moved his hand. John was thrashing, legs coming down and kicking uselessly. John might be dying. And he was wanking to the sight. "Stop!" Sherlock shouted, "You're not proving anything!"

He wanted to yell to John instead, but that would probably push Jim right over the edge.

After one more moment, Jim pulled the buzzing toy back, and unclamped John's throat.

John gasped wildly for air. "God," he rasped, and coughed. "Oh, god -- "

Jim grabbed his legs, bent him in half again, and thrust the dildo back in, going after his prostate with the vibrator. John keened, and his hips tried to buck up with no leverage.

"Fuck, oh -- oh christ!" John's legs tried to come down again, and when Jim pressed them back harder he grunted rhythmically. "Oh god!"

"It isn't enough, is it?" Jim taunted. "Even if you come, it isn't enough. You need more."

Overlaid on John's scent was that acrid horrible smell of another alpha. Jim's face had gone shiny with sweat and his cock was rigid and obvious in his trousers.

John moaned and his head thrashed back and forth.

"Say what you want, John," Jim ordered. "Just say it."

"Please."

" _Say it_."

"Fuck me. Do -- _ugh_ \-- do it. Fuck me. Please. I -- oh god _please_ \-- I need it. Fuck me." John's body rutted weakly back at Jim's jabbing hand.

But his eyes were fixed on Sherlock.

Jim didn't miss it. "Oh, that's sweet," he said. "He's still trying to stay loyal. But he won't."

He pulled out the vibrator and dropped it, still obscenely buzzing on the floor. It rolled towards Sherlock, bringing more of John's scent with it.

John cried out before Sherlock had realized Jim had picked up the scalpel again. Jim had nicked the inside of John's thigh and was licking blood and lubrication from his skin, working in, mouth finally against John's hole. John wailed and writhed and gasped and sobbed.

Jim lunged up over John, pressing John beneath him, his clothed cock against John's arse. His jaw was shiny with wetness, streaked with John's blood.

Rhythmically, roughly, he thrust his body down on John's, forcing Johns legs down harder, pressing on the bruises he'd made. With a vicious pull he tore the clamp from John's nipple, and John shrieked.

"What do you want, John?" Jim demanded. "Say it."

"Fuck me," John begged, sobbing. "Fuck me. _Please_. Please. Fuck me." He wasn't looking at Sherlock now. He wasn't looking anywhere. He was gone somewhere, lost in need and his heat.

Jim stilled at last, and turned his head to smile at Sherlock. His chest was heaving, and he looked triumphant. He climbed off John, who whimpered, and walked up to Sherlock. "Now you can come."

Sherlock's hand faltered.

Jim's face swooped down at his, contorted and bestial. "I said come!"

Sherlock pulled, twisted, jerked, reached for it.

Jim put one hand on Sherlock's knot, the other on his glans. The lower hand clenched, the upper fluttered.

Sherlock came with a groan, thick semen spurting over their hands, one pulse striping Jim's cheek.

Jim's eyes were warm, soft, fervernt. He looked like a man in the grip of some religious ecstasy. " _Sherlock_ ," he whispered, and kissed Sherlock's forehead ardently, once, twice, leaving a smear of mixed secretions.

"I know we're not done," he whispered. "We'll play again. Soon. We're getting so close." He kissed Sherlock's brow again, and walked from the room as if in a trance.

Silently, the bodyguard unwrapped John's wrists from the tubing and chained him again. John didn't struggle. He hardly moved.

The dildo was collected and silenced, then the tubing, the clamps, the scalpel and its wrapper, all put back in the bag. Despite Sherlock's hopes, nothing was missed.

And that left the two of them, messy and alone in the room.

"John -- " Sherlock murmured.

John's eyes were shut.

"John?"

"I'm sorry," John whispered. "God, I'm sorry."

"Listen to me. Are you all right?"

"Is that a fucking joke?"

"Are you still bleeding? Your -- your nipple -- " How absurd. After all this it felt strange to say the word 'nipple' to John Watson.

"No permanent damage," John said, but Sherlock didn't think he was really paying enough attention to tell.

"Listen to me, John," Sherlock said again, "It was bad. We knew it was going to be bad."

John curled away on his side. His shoulders were shaking.

"Cry if you need to," Sherlock said. "But nothing's changed. Nothing, John."

"I begged Moriarty to fuck me," John protested, voice even more ragged than it should have been after being choked like that. Moriarty had had to cut him, choke him, torture him, rape him with a dildo and cover him in alpha pheromones and still John had only begged him in the most technical sense. But John wouldn't see that now.

"He made me come," Sherlock said, ruthless with both of them. "Do you hate me for that?"

"No. God no."

"Then nothing's changed."

"He'll be back."

"Yes."

"Next time he'll do it."

Sherlock shut his eyes, considered Jim's eyes, his scent, his madness. "I think so, yes."

"I'll beg for it. I won't be able to help it."

Sherlock took a breath. "Will you still wish it was me?"

John turned over, licked his lips, met Sherlock's eyes with that incredible bravery. "Yes. I'll wish it was you."

Sherlock rubbed his fingers across his forehead. There would be a little of Moriarty's saliva and sweat in it, but mostly it was John's wetness, John's blood, and his own semen. He swiped up as much as he could and with his eyes on John, put his fingers in his mouth. It tasted the way the room should smell, himself, laid over his omega.

"Then you're still mine," he whispered.

John nodded once, slowly. "Yeah. Yeah."

 

\---


	6. Semen

Both of them had done their best to wipe themselves off on their mattresses, and then for a long time they just lay there, waiting for the next time. Sherlock wondered if there would be sandwiches again. The idea seemed fantastical. Food as a concept was surreal.

After an hour or so, he realized John was dozing. The cuts had closed, Sherlock could see, and while a largish area around the nipple was bruising, he couldn't see any torn flesh. He stared at John's slack, sleeping body. Soft in the middle but slim overall, muscle only where it was needed, for running, for the heavy packs he'd once had to lift. The scar on his shoulder -- baroque topography -- was in places dark, in others silvery. His face, softer than usual in sleep, looked young now, when usually he looked older than his years. His small hands were curled lax on his belly with the chain between them. In profile his nose was blunt, tip-tilted, absurdly charming. His soft open mouth, jaw just slightly under-slung, was delicately pink.

In the fantasy that he had any power here at all, Sherlock watched over John's sleeping. Every moment he looked made John more his. His to take, and his to protect. His.

John slept three hours, and there were no sandwiches. He woke and rubbed his face with his hands, and looked more than ever like some neatly-made little animal. "Sherlock," he murmured, sleepily.

"Here."

John looked over and, brave again, smiled at him. "Think he's done with the medical stuff? There's this trick with two Wartenburg wheels I actually wouldn't mind trying again."

It was too weak to raise a chuckle, but Sherlock smiled to reward the effort.

They both stood as though pulled to their feet at the first sound of gunfire.

"That'll be the cavalry, then," John said, tone flat but his voice a bit thready with stress.

"Or some of Moriarty's business rivals staging a hostile takeover."

"You can't tell just from the gunfire?"

"More your area, I'd have thought." Neither of them was allowing himself to get overly hopeful.

More fire.

"Oh yes," John said, "that's the sound of a six-foot, left-handed, blue-eyed MI-6 man with adenoids and a sick mother. Unmistakeable. We're rescued. Good on us." On most of John's body the fine hair was invisible and his skin looked almost absurdly smooth, and Sherlock still didn't know what it would feel like beneath his hands.

"Except for during the initial kidnapping, a rescue attempt is the most common time for a hostage to be killed," Sherlock said.

"Can I just say how terrible it would have been to be locked up for a week with someone who didn't have your optimism and sunny disposition?"

"If it is a rescue -- " Sherlock began.

The door opened. It was the bodyguard with the US Army training. He had a bleeding wound on his arm and a gun in his hand, and he went from the door straight at John.

Nobody followed. He'd come in alone.

"Vatican cameos," barked John.

John had vetoed Sherlock's original proposal of fifty-two coded phrases covering a wide range of situations which Sherlock had painstakingly organized and assigned to playing cards to make them easier for John to learn. He'd also refused Sherlock's suggestion that they practice them together three evenings a week. But he'd looked at the deck of cards Sherlock had marked for him and looked at Sherlock's face and gotten an odd expression that Sherlock wasn't sure he liked because he thought there might be pity in it. "We'll have three," he'd said. "One: You go right, I go left. Two: you go high, I go low. Three: you shut up because you're about to get yourself punched." Sherlock had ignored number three and John had let him make up the code names for the other two and cooperatively responded to them whenever Sherlock called them out, even in public.

Vatican cameos. Sherlock went high. He flung the mattress from his cot -- the only thing he had, useless as a projectile but big enough to be a distraction.

In the moment the bodyguard's attention was divided, John went low, knocked the man's legs out from under him, and they fell in a heap together on the floor, struggling. John used his two hands together, heavy with the cuffs, to bash the man's gun hand against the floor until the gun was knocked loose and slid away. John took a punch in the side and a kick, but worked his hands to either side of the man's neck and used the chain.

It took some time, shifting and squeezing with the chain before it was done and John was kneeling up with the bodyguard prone in front of him, choking with John's chain around his neck.

"Keys to the cuffs," John ordered. "Get them out. " He gave a punctuating twist, tightening the chain.

The man pulled the little bunch of keys free of his pocket.

"Slide them to Sherlock."

The keys scraped across the floor and Sherlock picked them up. He opened one cuff, then the other, and dropped the chain on the floor. It made his arms feel bizarrely light. He scooped up the gun in his other hand and pointed it at John's prisoner. "I could shoot you," Sherlock said. "Or kick you to death. Or John can finish strangling you. Up to you, John."

"Why don't I just take him off your hands?"

Lestrade stood in the open door, two officers behind him. His face showed his shock at the look of Sherlock and John, but right now he was in charge of a police operation and he'd stay professional.

John unwound the chain and Sherlock kept his gun pointed at the bodyguard all the time he was getting up, until one of Lestrade's officers handcuffed him. "Kidnapping, assault, sexual assault, attempted murder," Sherlock listed off for Lestrade.

"Get him out of here," Lestrade told his officers, "and have somebody find these men some clothes."

John had shifted to sit up on his cot, eyes fixed on the floor. Sherlock could see Lestrade's presence, the reminder of normal life, hitting him hard.

"Did you get Moriarty?" Sherlock demanded.

"Not so far. Reckon he was gone before we went in." Lestrade took off his long coat and held it out. "One of you can put this on, for a start."

Sherlock winced backward. "No."

"Thanks, but there's -- a smell issue," John clarified.

Lestrade's face contorted briefly before he got it under control again. "Right. Okay. I sort of figured. Your brother had me bring Dr. Connor along, Sherlock. He specializes in omegas going through their first heat. I can -- "

"You mean he's an alpha," Sherlock said.

"Well, yeah. Professional medical sex specialist -- "

"Prostitute."

"He's not," John put in. "He's a nice bloke."

Sherlock glared. It was bad enough Lestrade being here. Even betas were often aroused by omega pheromones. Finally Moriarty was no longer an issue and John was already thinking about another alpha? No, this would be settled. Now.

"No one comes in this room, Lestrade. No one. We'll deal with this. Get out."

Lestrade had a way of becoming subtly wider, massive and unmovable. "That's not good enough, Sherlock. There are laws."

"Stuff them."

"Do you know how this looks? You're seriously asking me to leave an omega, naked, in heat, in _chains_ , closed up in a room with a naked alpha holding a gun?"

Sherlock handed the gun over and then gave Lestrade a challenging look. The man just looked exasperated.

"It's all right, Greg," John said quietly. "I'm consenting."

He looked small and beaten down and he was living with the fact that Lestrade, a man he knew and respected, would never forget seeing him like this.

"You'll tell no one," Sherlock told Lestrade. "Not a word. Ever."

Lestrade rolled his eyes in that hugely irritating way that meant he was disappointed in Sherlock again. "Of bloody course I won't. Look, are you sure, John?"

"Yeah. Shut the door. Don't lock it. We'll see you later."

"Blankets," Sherlock said, "and food. Leave them outside the door."

"Water," John put in. "Sherlock's dehydrated."

Was he? He hadn't been aware.

"See you, then," Lestrade said in a subdued voice. He looked worried and sad, but he went, and the door shut after him, this time with no sound of the lock snapping into place.

Sherlock turned to John, who was still sitting with his eyes on the floor. After a moment John licked his lips, eyes flicking up to Sherlock. He sat straighter, lifted his chin.

Sherlock dropped to one knee in front of him and took one of John's hands. He unlocked the cuff. Then he unlocked the other. He threw them across the room with an angry grunt and they clanked in a heap on the floor.

John's chest was rising and falling rapidly, and he gazed down at Sherlock.

Sherlock leaned forward to bury his face in John's lap and inhale. He felt John's cool thighs, coarse pubic hair, hot slick swelling cock against his face. He breathed in the scent. His own cock felt so heavy between his legs. He took another breath and that was the very last he could stand.

With a sound in his throat like a growl, Sherlock moved back, grabbed John's arm and pulled him up a little, twisting him round and then shoving him with his belly against the side of the cot. John gasped but didn't fight back as he was pushed down with his chest against the mattress and his knees on the floor and his arse in the air. He shifted his legs wider, presenting. " _Please_ \-- " he whispered, tightly.

There were no decisions, no considerations, just the urgent need now, and Sherlock, still gripping John's arm to keep him in place, mounted and with his other hand lined his cock up, pressing the head against John's wet hole.

He grunted with effort, shoving forward with the whole weight of his body, and forced his way past the clenched resistance. John wailed at the sudden deep penetration.

Sherlock froze rigid, back arched and mouth open. It was beyond anything he'd ever felt. He'd imagined friction, slide and burn. John was so slick-wet it was nearly frictionless, and so much tighter than Sherlock would have believed. He moaned and moaned, and beneath him John was making a high whimpering noise.

Inside. His. Finally. Bliss.

Sherlock pulled back a little, thrust again. It got even better.

John still smelled so good it made him reel. But the mattress under them had another smell, an unforgivable smell. Another alpha here. On John, touching inside John. Sherlock could remember only hot dark eyes, not even a name, but he remembered the rage.

John was his. John had to know this. Everyone had to know. Grunting with effort, he battered his way deeper, putting the strength of his back into it. John moaned and shook under him.

"John," he groaned. "John -- John." And then he was pounding freely, loving it, loving John's strong body taking everything he could throw at it. Part of him wanted to just go on like this, fucking John forever.

But there was more, stinging urgency in his cock. Now. John his. Now.

He shuffled his knees for a better stance and gave a savage thrust.

John cried out.

"Take it," Sherlock whispered. "Take it. John. Take it."

John gasped. "No! I can't -- not the first -- "

Sherlock heaved forward again. "You can. Take it. John." Omegas often didn't take the knot the first time, worked up to it later in the heat. But John, so strong, John could take it. John had to take it.

"No," John protested, starting to panic. "Sherlock -- no -- "

Sherlock thrust again. Felt how close he was. John cried out again.

Sherlock locked an arm over John's shoulder, shifted to get better leverage. The nape of John's neck was right in front of his nose and it smelled heavenly. He bit down hard on it.

"Don't -- please, Sherlock, you can't -- " John begged. "No -- no -- _don't_ \-- "

Sherlock snapped his hips forward and jerked John back onto his cock with all his strength, felt John's body finally take him.

John screamed and thrashed around him. It was perfect. Possession and being possessed. It was ecstasy.

And then Sherlock screamed too. He hadn't known. Nobody had ever told him what this would be like. John's arse clamped down agonizingly on his knot and Sherlock was coming, but it wasn't like his occasional wanks, it was like having his belly ripped open with pleasure.

He was pulsing, ejaculating, but not just for a few sweet twitches. His whole body jerked spastically over and over and over, and it went on and on and he couldn't pull back, and his hips kept trying to thrust, but he couldn't, and under him John was shuddering and crying out in torment.

Locked together, they jerked and shook as John's body had its way with both of them, until Sherlock's mind had gone hazy and blank and all he could do was hold onto John and ride the storm. Finally the clenching slowed, and eased, and Sherlock whimpered at one last tremor and it was over. John was sobbing quietly in his arms. Sherlock kissed his hair, his shoulders, stroked him over and over until finally he relaxed enough that Sherlock slipped free.

Exhausted, Sherlock managed to pull the both of them fully onto the cot and wrapped himself around John's shivering body.

 

\---


	7. Tears

John dozed for hours lying on his side with Sherlock behind him, bodies touching only when one of them shifted. He felt just as he had felt that September when he was fifteen and his first full heat had come on. He had laid in his bed and stuck his fingers into himself and discovered, as every omega did, that it just didn't help. He'd whined, and ached, and in the middle of him something had spiralled tighter and tighter and tighter. He had felt that if he could just have someone inside him, just once, just for a moment, the whole thing would gloriously unspool and everything would be all right. And even as he'd felt it he'd hated himself for being so needy, so incomplete, so pathetic.

He'd gotten through that first full heat, emerging from his room after four days un-fucked, dry-skinned and exhausted and shaking, and after that he'd gone on the meds. But his family had made sure there wasn't an alpha anywhere near him all that time.

He had the advantages now of being older, more experienced, better in control of himself than a scared teenaged boy, but all that was cancelled out by the rich drugging smell of Sherlock all over him.

It was ramping up again, and before long his hips were tipping back against his will.

Sherlock, with a soft, " _Mmm_ \-- " wrapped a firm arm round him, shifted a bit to position himself, and pushed his cock smoothly into John.

John's head snapped back, his back arched, and he moaned in disbelief because it was so _good_ , so unbelievably good. The best part, the worst part, was the lie his body had been telling him. It wasn't unspooling, it was all twisting tighter, agonizingly, stingingly, wonderfully tighter. Sherlock was pressed up against his bruises and he didn't even care.

Holding him close, Sherlock thrust slowly, gently into him, just slightly deeper each time. Sherlock, the greatest mind of his fucking generation, brilliant Sherlock, amazing frustrating fantastic Sherlock, who should have been racing across London, dissecting corpses, playing the violin, making forensic technicians cry, was here instead, reduced to a cock for John Watson to ride.

They'd been so good, the two of them, and now they were this, and he couldn't stop wanting it, couldn't stop loving it. It was too much. As he had at fifteen, John began, silently, to weep with the unfairness of biology.

Sherlock stilled. John felt Sherlock's face pressed to his hair. "I can . . . I can stop," he whispered, voice a bare rasp.

John did his best to wipe his face on the mattress. "No you can't. For one thing I'll kill you if you try it. We just -- we get through this."

Sherlock's hand shifted slowly, restlessly, along John's body. "There is an injectable medication, it only needs to be given weekly, you could administer it to me, so I won't get careless."

As if Sherlock being better about taking his meds would have avoided all this. "If you want, but that's not really . . . " Sherlock pressed in harder and John trailed off with a shivery breath.

"There's an operation too," Sherlock went on. "Keyhole surgery. Sever some of the nerves in the knot, cut off some connections in the epididmus. Apparently it can be done in less than an hour."

John felt as if he'd been kicked upward and surfaced suddenly from a warm lake of pleasure into cold air. "What? What the hell, Sherlock? This -- this is your idea of pillow-talk, is it? Threatening to castrate yourself?"

Sherlock held John's back hard against his chest. "It isn't a threat. It's an offer. A . . . compromise. So you -- so you won't leave." His voice was so low John felt it as much as heard it.

"Jesus, Sherlock, you're . . . you're actually completely unhinged, aren't you?" This was the most unsettling conversation he'd ever had, and that was ignoring the fact that it was happening while he was being sodomized by his lunatic flatmate. "I told you, I'm not going anywhere."

"That was before I did this to you."

Which was Sherlock getting it all wrong again, because this was something John was doing to Sherlock. And maybe that was enough to explain it, Sherlock was borderline mad at the best of times, and right now John's pheromones had pushed him straight out over the edge. "We get through this," John repeated, "and then we go on. And god damn it, Sherlock, you cannot make an offer like that."

"Clearly I can," Sherlock said, a hint of his old petulance in his voice. "I've never used it before, I never will again, and this is my choice."

It. Sherlock was talking about his reproductive system as if it were a fountain pen or a kitchen appliance he was considering giving to Oxfam. "Oh my god. That's -- You're thirty-five years old, Sherlock, and you're ready to mutilate yourself for life. Somewhere out there might be an omega you'd actually -- someone who you'd _want_ to knot."

Sherlock started to move again, more urgently, pushing deep so John could feel the knot pressing at him each time.

John groaned unbelievingly. "You -- oh god -- you're not satisfied being bonkers by yourself, you're trying to drive me insane with you."

"That woman -- I told her her daughter's suicide was boring, and you -- you told me I was being cruel and you went for a walk -- " Sherlock's breathing was going ragged and he was grinding his hips.

"For god's sake, Sherlock, talk bollocks or fuck me, but stop bloody multitasking."

At least this time Sherlock kept moving. "And when I -- I woke up on the couch you'd put a blanket -- John! -- left me a cup of tea and -- and a defaced novel." Sherlock's hips stayed hard against John while his shoulders moved back as he hunched to bite at John's shoulder.

The bite, the sucking there, felt incredible. And then Sherlock bit hard at the back of his neck again and John felt his body go hot and stunned. It was one of those things alphas did to omegas that John had always sneered at, but it was so good to feel it, to feel Sherlock doing it to him.

Maybe all this really was just Sherlock's bizarre notion of pillow talk and John should stop trying to make sense of it.

John remembered the book. It had been one of his bids at fighting off Sherlock's boredom: he'd ripped out the last two chapters of a mystery novel and left it with a note promising to cede the kitchen table to science for a week if Sherlock figured out the murderer by the end of the day. They'd had a friendly sort of wrangle over whether the end of the day meant John's bedtime, midnight, or whenever Sherlock next felt like sleeping, and for a little while Sherlock had been mildly distracted. John had known better than to try the same thing the next time, but he'd filed the trick away to use again in a year or so as needed.

Oh.

"You want to -- " John's ability to speak was breaking up. "to neuter yourself so -- god, yes, like that -- so I stick around -- to do tricks for you?" He began to rock his hips helplessly.

Sherlock gave an anguished moan. He was shuddering. His cock was huge and perfect inside John.

John bucked back hard. "Idiot. You might -- god, don't stop -- you might meet an omega you want to spend the rest of your bloody life with someday."

Sherlock made a choked sound like agony, clamping his arm across John's chest, and those shudders felt like --

Those were sobs.

"Sherlock -- " John whispered, shocked into going still.

"I did," Sherlock whimpered, "I have. _John_ \--" And then with a long terrible groan he slammed his hips up.

The shock of the knot being forced into him and the shock of what Sherlock had said felt like the same thing: something too vast, too magnificent for him to survive.

The first time had been terrifying, Sherlock breaching him so brutally, the sudden blunt pain and horrible wrong shift as his insides were pushed into their new shape. He'd ejaculated until he couldn't any more, and it just went on and on and on, his insides clenching rhythmically and with every clench a wave like a sheet of electricity hitting his body, and it went on, and it went on, and he'd been sobbing helplessly for it to end as his body gave those last few sly flutters before finally, finally there was release and he'd gone boneless and heavy.

This time was just as overwhelming, but Sherlock had been gentler, taken longer, and John was ready. He felt rings of muscle stretch painfully and then clench, and heard Sherlock's wail, and felt himself coming -- the familiar buzz of pleasure centered on his cock, like every orgasm he'd ever had when life was normal. But there was also the slide and dull cramp as his anatomy shifted, and instead of fading the orgasm went on, it grew outward to cover the rest of his body, and his muscles were rippling and with every tiny movement he felt Sherlock's cock jerking inside him. Every time it rubbed across his prostate was like a gout of flame. His body seized over and over, crushing him with sweetness.

He could feel that Sherlock's hips were still helplessly trying to thrust against the hold that wouldn't let him shift a millimetre. He was repeating, "John, _John_ ," in a lost, desperate way, broken up by harsh grunts as if he were being stabbed.

After a long, long time that he knew could actually have been no more than three minutes -- unless he was some kind of medical anomaly -- the contractions of John's body went arrhythmic, spaced out and weakening. John rode out the end of it, easier this time, just floating over gentler and gentler waves of bliss until every muscle was soft and unstrung and he was lying still.

Sherlock was still clinging, flush against him.

"John -- " he rasped.

Oh for heaven's sake, could the man not come to a complete stop ever?

"Sleep," John mumbled.

"I -- "

"Hormones," John provided. "Talked a load of rubbish. Sleep now."

Sherlock tensed as if to argue, damn the man. Then the fight went out of him and he relaxed.

"Sleep now," John repeated, and heard his voice blurred probably beyond comprehensibility. "Need your energy in an hour or so."

Sherlock's hand stroked John's chest, sliding over slickness that was part sweat and part John's own thin ejaculate. It settled with his palm over John's left nipple, riding his inhale and exhale. "John." It was a dark, rough whisper that asked for no response but John's presence. John put his own hand over Sherlock's.

For now, for this little while, he was Sherlock's omega. Later, when they were both normally medicated again -- and nobody was at any point going to go under the scalpel thanks very much -- then they would be John and Sherlock again, just two odd blokes whose lives had inexplicably, irrevocably fused together. He'd run errands and hold his temper and try to keep Sherlock alive; he'd be what he'd been since the start: Sherlock's man. Biology could go hang.

 

\---

**Author's Note:**

> Comments craved, loved, hoarded, and taken out to gloat over on bad days. Thanks for reading!
> 
>   
> .  
> 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Drouk](https://archiveofourown.org/works/491499) by [TheDugongG](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDugongG/pseuds/TheDugongG)




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